What’s Next for Trans Cinema?
The “trans image,” as Caden Mark Gardner and Willow Catelyn Maclay call it, has experienced some of the most tumultuous of growing pains, from the cultural impact of movies like The Silence of the Lambs and Psycho to the phenomenon of cisgender actors being cast as trans characters in Oscar weepies like Boys Don’t Cry and Dallas Buyers Club. But this year alone has seen the release of films such as I Saw the TV Glow and The People’s Joker, and Hunter Schaeffer leading Cuckoo.
The cursory glance at trans film history suggests a litany of negative tropes and political detritus, with the occasional dated work of compassion or sympathy. But, as Gardner and Maclay, longtime critics of the highest order with writing in the Village Voice, Reverse Shot, Polygon, cléo film journal, and the Criterion Collection reveal, the history of trans images — authored and featuring — is much more complex, nuanced and engaged with both the history of cinema itself and the social and political developments and reactions to trans identity.
The pair found seeds of their collaboration in a series of “combative” dialogues called BodyTalk, and it has come to full bloom in their book Corpses, Fools and Monsters. Gardner and Maclay’s book, a swift read whose prose belies the authors’ passion for cinema and placing the works in context, is a testament to the power and pulsating adoration they have for movies and what they can tell us about culture, society and ourselves. As they comb through a spectacular array of movies, high (So Pretty), low (Glen or Glenda) and beyond categorization (Funeral Parade of Roses), their book asserts that cinema (and their film criticism with it) is not unlike gender and its discourses: necessarily in conversation with its past, and ready to blaze a new future.
PAPER spoke with the pair about translating their dialogues to book form, the contradictory readings some of these movies offer up and to speculate a little on the future of trans cinema.
First of all, congratulations. So so happy for both of you. It’s really fantastic, of course, and I’m just so happy and excited to have seen both of you and your writing evolve over so many years and culminate in this book.
Willow Catelyn Maclay: Thank you. Today was kind of a big day. We saw our review in Sight and Sound today for the first time, which was a rave. We’re really stoked about that.
The origins of this book are the BodyTalk series, which I also really loved. What was the process of shifting these conversations that you were having that were actual dialogs into the book structurally?
Caden Mark Gardner: We knew we had to write it as a book; we had seen these academic essays trying to do a kind of radical dialog of these works and conversations, but I wasn’t really sure how much that could sustain [itself], especially because I would say in both of our cases, we do have very unique perspectives and vantage points of certain things, like, if Willow wanted to, talk about anime and transcoding, I would just almost be like someone who would just be like, nod, Yeah, yeah, that’s brilliant.
Willow: Drag me, Caden. [Laughs]
Caden: And on the other side of things, me talking about Renee Richards’ whole history with the US tennis. Like, even though Willow is also into sports, she wouldn’t necessarily know the kind of weird, esoteric historical things in my brain as well. So I think as far as that approach, like us blending and and combining that into a sort of general voice that goes through these sort of cascades and intersections of various things and topics, but still being very cohesive, that was primarily the goal, because we did want this to read like a book, not necessarily a print off PDF of all the BodyTalks together.
We wanted to take the conversational tone that we had in the BodyTalk series and make it more objective and dispassionate. We’ve heard BodyTalk described before as, like, “combative,” which was entirely the point at the time. We kind of had a chip on our shoulder when we started BodyTalk many years ago, because we were beginner film critics, but we were lifelong cinephiles, and we had these opinions about transness that we didn’t see reflected in mainstream film criticism.
When we were turning that into a book, we kind of had to soften the chip on our shoulder to a degree and be as distanced as we could with how we were making our points without feeling like we were preaching.
Were there any movies that you felt differently about writing the book, as opposed to when you had initially written about it or discussed it for the BodyTalk series?
Caden: It was always curious and interesting how The Silence of the Lambs, which was our first one, always kept coming up. I wouldn’t necessarily say my perspective on the movie changed radically. I still have this very sort of respect and ambivalence mixed all together, because I can’t deny that it’s a greatly performed and made movie. But also, it’s such a curious thing, as far as what was actively removed from the adaptation to try to distance itself from the transness of the novel, but also the combination of the historical facts regarding the actual Johns Hopkins University gender clinic that popped up.
[I talked] to trans elders and talking about the experience of medical gatekeeping in the 1980s and [one person was] like, “Oh yeah, that term ‘true transsexual’ that comes up in Silence of the Lambs; that was something that we that was often said all the time,” and it actually does come up a lot in trans publications at the time. It became this very prescriptive word that was wielded against trans people who wanted to get the care they wanted, but often were denied.
In 1979, the gender clinic basically halted trans surgeries. They produced this paper to basically state, it didn’t seem worth it, essentially to give trans people surgery, because they basically don’t live happy lives after that. And there was a large closure of gender clinics in the ‘80s in North America, but primarily in the United States, because if Johns Hopkins essentially closed its doors, its influence would carry over into other institutions. So even just that part was not something that I was conscious about in the first BodyTalk all that information, and basically getting more ingratiated in terms of not just finding all these trans Publications at the time, thankfully through the digital Transgender Archive, and also talking to trans people who lived at that time and are still alive .So that was a very sort of interesting thing to uncover and expand upon in the book.
Willow: I don’t think that our opinions necessarily shifted from BodyTalk to Corpses, Fools and Monsters, but I would say that our ability to talk about all of these films and these topics became more nuanced with the information through our deep dives into research. With BodyTalk, a lot of our initial arguments had depth, but it was a very pointed depth. We were talking about our experiences more from a personal standpoint with these films, rather than talking about the film as a broader cultural object. And I think that The Silence of the Lambs is a great example of that, because we did talk about our own history with the film, but in Corpses, Fools and Monsters, we talk about the the effect [the film] had in the United States in the 1990s throughout the remaining decades in film through culture, the effect that it had on trans people, and how the film is still trickling down and having an effect in the way that the trans feminine image is being perceived today. Like Longlegs just came out, and this is a film which echoes the Buffalo Bill image in a faint way that I think that audiences can unconsciously pick up on.
Absolutely. Did you feel any particular way about revisiting old writing as you were working through the book?
Willow: I think that one thing that we did for Corpses, Fools, and Monsters is that we treated a lot of our old writing on trans subjects as kind of a rough draft of ideas for us to expand upon and give fuller depth to. I know that in some cases we took initial drafts of some of the things that we had said in BodyTalk and pulled a sentence or two and then just brought it to fuller life within the text. We looked at what we said in BodyTalk for [certain films] and then just took that writing and then gave it a new body, essentially by sprucing it up and updating it to our skill set now and what our editors expected of us.
Caden: Yeah, we gave our book good Facial Feminization Surgery.
An interesting thing within Corpses, Fools and Monsters is that there are a lot of films that obviously have historical significance for either cementing or reifying harmful tropes, your Psychos, your Dressed to Kills, your Silence of the Lambses, but as a fan of your work, and also a fan of the reparative reading,Ii noticed you do take the reparative tactic to some of these films. When you were mapping out which movies you want to write about, what were the directions and sometimes contradictory readings of some of these movies that came up?
Willow: We were always going to have a reparative tone to some of these films. We tried very hard to not just take a film and just cut its knees out from underneath it. We wanted to give as much nuance as possible to the readings of these films, so we could give a window into how trans viewers might look at a film in a way that gave it a fuller picture of itself in the way that our community might react to it. In a lot of ways, this resulted in us trying to look at the way that trans people were reacting to movies about transness in real time, which involved us doing a lot of research and looking at the opinions that trans people had of films that maybe we don’t talk about as much today. Like, Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde was written about by trans people as almost a fantasy film. And in that movie, it takes the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde concept and gives it a gender transformation, where they become a woman, essentially an evil woman who kills, but like, she slays, she’s cool. But there were trans people who wrote of that, like, thinking like, Oh, if only that could happen to me. Like they saw the disreputable image and saw the fantasy in it as well. And I think that that’s a really vital way for trans people and queer people at large to look at movies, because we’re looking at movies that maybe didn’t have their best interests in mind for us, and maybe we take them on to better cement our own image and how we feel about ourselves.
In our own experiences, we’ve liked movies about transness that other trans people didn’t like, and there are movies that trans people hate, that we love, and there are movies that we hate that trans people love. Caden and I aren’t the biggest fans of Sleepaway Camp, but there are a lot of people who have taken the image of that film and reclaimed it for themselves. There’s an image of Angela at the end of that movie that’s being sold as a sticker with, like, “no terfs” written on it or something.
We knew that we were not a monolith of a community, but when we were looking at these films, we wanted to try and give our own perspective, but also try and give way to the broader voice that trans people had about these movies. We weren’t doing this to try to undervalue our points, but to give them a broader complexity of how trans people look at movies in ways that are often not totally aligned with what the film is trying to say or the intent of what the images necessarily represent.
Caden: I have a lot of ambivalence about Hedwig and the Angry Inch, I would say, though I’m a lot higher on it than Willow. But I also, at the same time, wanted to explore the fact that this was, in many ways, the first trans film for a lot of people in our age group, even though John Cameron Mitchell is saying contradictory things about how they feel about the film. I think, in many ways, they were reacting to the fact that it’s not perfect, clean representation. But most trans representation is messy. It is compromised. It is something that’s going to be a very sort of imperfect thing.
Willow: Even the title of the book is in communication with tropes and ideas associated with transness, and then just filtering them through how we’ve had to look at movies.
Which film genres most shaped your perspective — and perspectives in general — about trans cinema?
Willow: I think Caden and I can both speak to the reality of growing up underneath the shadow of The Silence of the Lambs. We were both born in the period when that movie was released, and then it became a cultural object almost immediately, and we see the effect of that alongside our realization of transness in a way that I think really complicates our ability to look at images of transness on screen. And it isn’t until many years later, when we become really hardcore cinephiles, that we begin to see transness in a new light.
One thing that I’ve frequently said about this book is that trans people have a fragmented, complicated relationship with cinema, if they love movies, because it’s at once a way for you to see yourself in the fantasy of another person. Because cinema as a structure is fundamentally trans in that way. But when you’re actually looking at direct representations of transness on screen, it can sometimes be very difficult to see the availability to live a life that is full and available and possible. And I think that one way that we’re seeing this complicated today is trans filmmakers starting to make movies where they take the genres that maybe that they fixated on due to the circumstances of not having access to a broader film canon, and then implanting transness upon them. Like you mentioned Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow, but there’s also Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker — these are ways for transness to exist and live and thrive and evolve on-screen.
Caden: We sometimes joke among each other about the potential that has not been enacted. Like, we should just have a trans version of The Searchers. We should have a trans version of Smokey and the Bandit. I don’t know what it says about me that I watched a lot of Westerns when I just started testosterone.
It’s interesting that movies like The People’s Joker and I Saw the TV Glow and Stress Positions are all coming from these smaller distributors who are making meaningful competition against legacy studios. But those smaller distributors have to make money, and they are getting bigger, and the way resources are being allocated is getting stranger.
Caden: Sometimes seeing trans film images within a genre setting might be how some of these progressions could be made. Although it has to definitely go beyond just having someone like Hunter Schaefer — but also having it be presented with trans authorship and cultural production. These successes regarding trans cultural production might have to come through something as lucrative as a genre film. And obviously that would be good business for us, because we are both genre heads. But it would be nice to also see somebody like Theda Hamel [get those resources]. I think perhaps the way paths are forged might be through genre. But it would also be cool if we had this radical, awesome, huge, sweeping trans biopic made that involved trans people along the way.
Willow: Our final chapter, on the modern trans film image, came about very organically. It was a gift to us that we had all of these films that we could look at in closing, and we had a way to take these films that have come out since about 2019 or so and talk about how they are in communication with the past and charting a new path for us in the future. And our book does end on a hopeful note, in thinking that maybe we can cast off the past in a way that will give us new trans film images.
But the reality of it is that it really boils down to the fact that these works need to be supported at a monetary level by people who have the means to do so. It’s significant that Emma Stone put as much backbone into I Saw the TV Glow that she did. She helped finance it. And I think it’s also worth noting that Vera Drew has talked consistently about the fact that she has gone into an extreme amount of debt because of The People’s Joker.
Okay, last question. So the necessary evil of writing a book that’s a large historical survey of cinema is there’s a lot there. There are frequently times when the work that you’re writing about isn’t currently in circulation, or it’s out of print. I’d had that experience with The Queer Film Guide. If you could pick one movie that you could put back into circulation and you get to write the liner notes, what would it be?
Willow: There’s this Canadian documentary about transness called Hookers on Davie, which I think is one of the most incisive, beautiful portraits of transness and queerness in general, in the way that it often intertwines with the political realities of sex work and economics and the circumstances of being disowned within your own family, that I think is really vital in understanding the precarious, vulnerable nature of what it means to be trans and how to survive as a trans person.
Caden: I kind of want Some of My Best Friends Are… to get a little more love. It’s played on TCM, so it’s not, like, completely out of circulation. This movie needs to be restored, it’s like this post-Stonewall, down-in-the-dumps, Blue Christmas type of feel-bad movie that I really like and respond to. And Candy Darling’s performance is incredible and incredibly brave. It’s an overused term, especially regarding describing actors and trans roles, but I think her vulnerability and willingness to basically go to the depths of where that character has to go in his place was an extremely brave performance on her part. And yeah, I want that to recirculate.
Photos courtesy of Caden Mark Gardner and Willow Catelyn Maclay
The “trans image,” as Caden Mark Gardner and Willow Catelyn Maclay call it, has experienced some of the most tumultuous of growing pains, from the cultural impact of movies like The Silence of the Lambs and Psycho to the phenomenon of cisgender actors being cast as trans characters in Oscar weepies like Boys Don’t Cry…